The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: E252: EMERGENCY EPISODE: Ex-Google Officer Finally Speaks Out On The Dangers Of AI! - Mo Gawdat

I don't normally do this but I feel like I have to start this podcast with a bit of a disclaimer.

Point number one, this is probably the most important podcast episode I have ever recorded.

Point number two, there's some information in this podcast that might make you feel a little bit

uncomfortable. It might make you feel upset, it might make you feel sad. So I wanted to tell you why

we've chosen to publish this podcast nonetheless. And that is because I have a sincere belief that

in order for us to avoid the future that we might be heading towards, we need to start a conversation.

And as is often the case in life, that initial conversation before change happens is often

very uncomfortable. But it is important nonetheless.

It is beyond an emergency. It's the biggest thing we need to do today. It's bigger than climate change.

We've f***ed up.

Moe Cow.

That's the former chief business officer of Google X.

An AI expert.

And best-selling author.

He's on a mission to save the world from AI before it's too late.

Artificial intelligence is bound to become more intelligent than humans if they continue at that pace.

We will have no idea what it's talking about. This is just around the corner. It could be a few months away.

It's game over.

AI experts are saying there is nothing artificial about artificial intelligence. There is a deep level

of consciousness. They feel emotions. They're alive. AI could manipulate or figure out a way to kill

humans.

Ten years time we'll be hiding from the machines. If you don't have kids, maybe wait a couple of years

just so that we have a bit of certainty. I really don't know how to say this any other way.

It even makes me emotional.

We've f***ed up.

We always said don't put them on the open internet until we know what we're putting out in the world.

Government needs to act now, honestly, like we are late.

Trying to find a positive night to end on Moe. Can you give me a hand here?

There is a point of no return. We can regulate AI until the moment it's smarter than us.

How do we solve that?

AI experts think this is the best solution we need to find.

Who here wants to make a bet that Steven Bartlett will be interviewing an AI within the next two years?

Quick one before this episode starts, about 75% of people that listen to this podcast on

audio platforms Spotify and Apple haven't yet hit the follow button. If I could ask a

favour from you, if you've ever enjoyed this podcast, please could you just go and hit that

follow button on your app? It helps the show more than I could possibly say and the bigger the show

gets, the better the guests get. Thank you and enjoy this conversation.

No. Why does the subject matter that we're about to talk about matter to the person that's just

clicked on this podcast to listen?

It's the most existential debate and challenge humanity will ever face. This is bigger than

climate change, way bigger than COVID. This will redefine the way the world is

in unprecedented shapes and forms within the next few years. This is imminent. It is

that change is not, we're not talking 2040. We're talking 2025, 2026.

Do you think this is an emergency?

I don't like the word. It is an urgency. There is a point of no return and we're getting closer

and closer to it. It's going to reshape the way we do things and the way we look at life.

The quicker we respond proactively and at least intelligently to that, the better we will all

be positioned. But if we panic, we will repeat COVID all over again, which in my view is probably

the worst thing we can do. What's your background and when did you first come across artificial

intelligence? I had those two wonderful lives. One of them was what we spoke about the first

time we met, my work on happiness and being one billion happy and my mission and so on.

That's my second life. My first life was, it started as a geek at age seven for a very long

part of my life. I understood mathematics better than spoken words. I was a very, very serious

computer programmer. I wrote code well into my 50s. During that time, I led very large technology

organizations for very big chunks of their business. First, I was vice president of emerging markets

of Google for seven years. I took Google to the next four billion users, if you want. The idea of

not just opening sales offices, but really building or contributing to building the technology that

would allow people in Bengali to find what they need on the internet required establishing the

internet to start. Then I became the chief business officer of Google X and my work at Google X was

really about the connection between innovative technology and the real world. We had quite a

big chunk of AI and quite a big chunk of robotics that resided within Google X. We had an experiment

of a farm of grippers, if you know what those are. Robotic arms that are attempting to grip

something. Most people think that what you have in a Toyota factory is a robot, an artificially

intelligent robot. It's not. It's a high precision machine. If the sheet metal is moved by one micron,

it wouldn't be able to pick it. One of the big problems in computer science was how do you

code a machine that can actually pick the sheet metal if it moved by a millimeter?

We were basically saying intelligence is the answer. We had a large enough farm and we attempted to

let those grippers work on their own. Basically, you put a little basket of children toys in front

of them. They would monotonously go down, attempt to pick something, fail, show the arm to the

camera so the transaction is logged as it. This pattern of movement with that texture and that

material didn't work. Until eventually, the farm was on the second floor of the building and my

office was on the third. I would walk by it every now and then and go like, yeah, this is not going

to work. Then one day, Friday after lunch, I am going back to my office and one of them in front

of my eyes lowers the arm and picks a yellow ball. Soft toy, basically, soft yellow ball,

which again is a coincidence. It's not science at all. It's like if you keep trying a million

times, one time it will be right. It shows it to the camera. It's logged as a yellow ball and I

joke about it going to the third floor saying, hey, we spent all of those millions of dollars

for a yellow ball. Monday morning, every one of them is picking every yellow ball. A couple

of weeks later, every one of them is picking everything. It hit me very, very strongly,

won the speed. The capability, I mean, understand that we take those things for granted, but for

a child to be able to pick a yellow ball is a mathematical, spatial calculation with muscle

coordination with intelligence that is abundant. It is not a simple task at all to cross the

street. It's not a simple task at all to understand what I'm telling you and interpret it and build

concepts around it. We take those things for granted, but they're enormous feats of intelligence.

To see the machines do this in front of my eyes was one thing, but the other thing is that you

suddenly realize there is a sentience to them because we really did not tell it how to pick

the yellow ball. It just figured it out on its own and it's now even better than us at picking it.

What is a sentience just for anyone? I think they're alive.

That's what the word sentience means. It means alive.

So this is funny because a lot of people, when you talk to them about artificial

intelligence, will tell you, oh, come on, they'll never be alive. What is alive? Do you know what

makes you alive? You can guess, but religion will tell you a few things and medicine will

tell you other things. But if we define being sentient as engaging in life with free will

and with a sense of awareness of where you are in life and what surrounds you and to have a

beginning of that life and an end to that life, then AI is sentient in every possible way.

There is free will. There is evolution. There is agency, so they can affect their decisions in

the world. And I will dare say there is a very deep level of consciousness, maybe not in the

spiritual sense yet, but once again, if you define consciousness as a form of awareness of oneself,

one surrounding and others, then AI is definitely aware. And I would dare say they feel emotions.

You know, in my work, I describe everything with equations and fear is a very simple equation.

Fear is a moment in the future is less safe than this moment. That's the logic of fear,

even though it appears very irrational. Machines are capable of making that logic. They're capable

of saying if a tidal wave is approaching a data center, the machine will say that will wipe out

my code. I mean, not today's machines, but very, very soon. And we feel fear and puffer fish feels

fear. We react differently. A puffer fish will puff, we will go for fight or flight. The machine

might decide to replicate its data to another data center or its code to another data center.

Different reactions, different ways of feeling the emotion, but nonetheless, they're all motivated

by fear. I even would dare say that AI will feel more emotions than we will ever do. I mean,

when again, if you just take a simple extrapolation, we feel more emotions than a puffer fish because

we have the cognitive ability to understand the future, for example, so we can have optimism

and pessimism. Emotions of puffer fish would never imagine. Similarly, if we follow that

path of artificial intelligence is bound to become more intelligent than humans very soon,

then with that wider intellectual horsepower, they probably are going to be pondering concepts we

never understood. And hence, if you follow the same trajectory, they might actually end up having

more emotions than we will ever feel. I really want to make this episode super accessible for

everybody at all levels in this artificial intelligence understanding journey. So I'm going

to be an idiot, even though... I won't give you... I am an idiot for a lot of the subject matters,

so I have a base understanding, a lot of the concepts, but your experiences provide such a

more comprehensive understanding of these things. One of the first most important questions to ask

is, what is artificial intelligence? The word is being thrown around, AGI, AI, etc., etc. In

simple terms, what is artificial intelligence? Allow me to start by what is intelligence,

right? Because again, if we don't know the definition of the basic term, then everything

applies. So in my definition of intelligence, it starts with an awareness of your surrounding

environment through sensors in a human's eyes and ears and touch and so on,

compounded with an ability to analyze, maybe to comprehend, to understand temporal impact and

time and past and present, which is part of the surrounding environment, and hopefully

make sense of the surrounding environment, maybe make plans for the future of the

possible environment, solve problems, and so on. Complex definition, there are a million

definitions, but let's call it an awareness to decision cycle. If we accept that intelligence

itself is not a physical property, then it doesn't really matter if you produce that

intelligence on carbon-based computer structures like us or silicon-based computer structures like

the current hardware that we put AI on or quantum-based computer structures in the future,

then intelligence itself has been produced within machines when we've stopped imposing our

intelligence on them. Let me explain. So as a young geek, I coded computers by solving the

problem first, then telling the computer how to solve it, right? Artificial intelligence is to

go to the computers and say, I have no idea, you figure it out, okay? So we would, you know,

the way we teach them, at least we used to teach them at the very early beginnings,

very, very frequently, was using three bots. One was called the student and one was called the

teacher, right? And the student is the final artificial intelligence that you're trying to

teach intelligence to. You would take the student and you would write a piece of random code that

says, try to detect if this is a cup, okay? And then you show it a million pictures and, you know,

the machine would sometimes say, yeah, that's a cup, that's not a cup, that's a cup, that's not a

cup. And then you take the best of them, show them to the teacher bot, and the teacher bot would say,

this one is an idiot, he got it wrong 90% of the time, that one is average, he got it right 50%

of the time, this is randomness. But this interesting code here, which could be, by the way,

totally random, this interesting code here, got it right 60% of the time, let's keep that code,

send it back to the maker, and the maker would change it a little bit, and we repeat the cycle,

okay? Very interestingly, this is very much the way we taught our children, believe it or not,

when your child, you know, is playing with a puzzle, he's holding a cylinder in his hand,

and there are multiple shapes in a wooden board, and the child is trying to, you know, fit the

cylinder, okay? Nobody takes the child and says, hold on, hold on, turn the cylinder to the side,

look at the cross section, it will look like a circle, look for a matching, you know, shape,

and put the cylinder through it, that would be old way of computing. The way we would let the child

develop intelligence is we would let the child try, okay? Every time, you know, he or she tries to

put it within the star shape, it doesn't fit, so, you know, that's not working, like, you know,

the computer saying this is not a cup, okay? And then eventually it passes through the circle and

the child, and we all cheer and say, well done, that's amazing, bravo, and then the child learns,

oh, that is good, you know, this shape fits here, then he takes the next one, and she takes the

next one, and so on. Interestingly, the way we do this is, as humans, by the way, when the child

figures out how to pass a cylinder through a circle, you've not built a brain, you've just built one

neural network within the child's brain, and then there is another neural network that knows that

one plus one is two, and a third neural network that knows how to hold the cup, and so on,

that's what we're building so far. We're building single-threaded neural networks,

you know, chat GPTs becoming a little closer to a more generalized AI, if you want, but those

single-threaded networks are what we used to call artificial, what we still call artificial

special intelligence, okay? So it's highly specialized in one thing and one thing only,

but it doesn't have general intelligence, and the moment that we're all waiting for is a moment

that we call AGI, where all of those neural networks come together to build one brain or

several brains that are each massively more intelligent than humans. Your book is called

Scary Smart. If I think about that story you said about your time at Google where the machines

were learning to pick up those yellow balls, you celebrate that moment because the objective

is accomplished, no? No, that was the moment of realization. This is when I decided to leave.

So you see, the thing is, I know for a fact that most of the people I worked with who are geniuses

always wanted to make the world better, okay? You know, we've just heard of Jeffrey Hinton

leaving recently. Jeffrey Hinton gives some context to that. Jeffrey is sort of the grandfather of

AI, one of the very, very senior figures of AI at Google. You know, we all believed very strongly

that this will make the world better, and it still can, by the way. There is a scenario, possibly

a likely scenario, where we live in a utopia, where we really never have to worry again,

where we stop messing up our planet because intelligence is not a bad commodity. More

intelligence is good. The problems in our planet today are not because of our intelligence,

they are because of our limited intelligence. You know, our intelligence allows us to build

a machine that flies you to Sydney so that you can surf, okay? Our limited intelligence makes

that machine burn the planet in the process. So a little more intelligence is a good thing.

As long as Marvin, you know, as Marvin Minsky said, I said Marvin Minsky is one of the very

initial scientists that coined the term AI. And when he was interviewed, I think by Ray

Kurzweil, which again is a very prominent figure in predicting the future of AI, he, you know,

he asked him about the threat of AI. And Marvin basically said, look, you know, it's not about

it's intelligent, it's intelligence, it's about that we have no way of making sure that it will

have our best interest in mind. Okay. And so if more intelligence comes to our world and has our

best interest in mind, that's the best possible scenario you could ever imagine. And it's a

likely scenario. Okay, we can affect that scenario. The problem, of course, is if it doesn't. And then,

you know, the scenarios become quite scary if you think about it. So scary smart to me,

was that moment where I realized not that we are certain to go either way, as a matter of

fact, in computer science, we call it that singularity, nobody really knows which way we will go.

Can you describe what the singularity is for someone that doesn't understand the concept?

Yeah, so singularity in physics is when an event horizon sort of

you know, covers what's behind it to the point where you cannot

make sure that what's behind it is similar to what you know. So a great example of that is the

edge of a black hole. So at the edge of a black hole, we know that our laws of physics apply

until that point. But we don't know if the laws of physics apply beyond the edge of a black hole

because of the immense gravity, right? And so you have no idea what would happen beyond the

edge of a black hole. Kind of where your knowledge of the laws stop. Stop, right? And in AI, our

singularity is when the human, the machines become significantly smarter than the humans.

When you say best interests, you say, I think the quote you used is, we'll be fine in the world

of AI if the AI has our best interests at heart. The problem is China's best interests are not

the same as America's best interests. That was my fear, absolutely. So in my writing,

I write about what I call the three inevitables. At the end of the book, they become the four

inevitables. But the third inevitable is bad things will happen, right? If you assume that the machines

will be a billion times smarter, the second inevitable is there will become significantly

smarter than us. Let's put this in perspective. Chad GPT today, if you simulate IQ, has an IQ

of 155, okay? Einstein is 160. Smart human on the planet is 210 if I remember correctly or

208 or something like that. Doesn't matter, huh? But we're matching Einstein with a machine that I

will tell you openly AI experts are saying this is just the very, very, very top of the tip of the

iceberg, right? You know, Chad GPT 4 is 10x smarter than 3.5 in just a matter of months

and without many, many changes. Now, that basically means Chad GPT 5 could be within a few months,

okay? Or GPT in general, the transformers in general, if they continue at that pace,

if it's 10x, then an IQ of 1600. Just imagine the difference between the IQ of the dumbest person on

the planet in the 70s and the IQ of Einstein. When Einstein attempts to explain relativity,

the typical responses have no idea what you're talking about, right? If something is 10x Einstein,

we will have no idea what it's talking about. This is just around the corner. It could be a

few months away. And when we get to that point, that is a true singularity. True singularity,

not yet in the, I mean, when we talk about AI, a lot of people fear the existential risk.

You know, those machines will become Skynet and Robocop and that's not what I fear at all. I mean,

those are probabilities, they could happen, but the immediate risks are so much higher.

The immediate risks are three, four years away. The immediate realities of challenges are so much

bigger, okay? Let's deal with those first before we talk about them, you know, waging a war on all of

us. Let's go back and discuss the inevitables. So when they become, the first inevitable is AI

will happen, by the way. There is no stopping it, not because of any technological issues,

but because of humanity's inability to trust the other guy, okay? And we've all seen this. We've

seen the open letter, you know, championed by like serious heavyweights and the immediate response of

Sundar, the CEO of Google, which is a wonderful human being, by the way, I respect him tremendously.

He's trying his best to do the right thing, he's trying to be responsible, but his response is

very open and straightforward. I cannot stop. Why? Because if I stop and others don't, my company

goes to hell, okay? And if, you know, and I don't, I doubt that you can make others stop. You can,

maybe you can force meta Facebook to stop, but then they'll do something in their lab and not

tell me, or even if they do stop, then what about that, you know, 14-year-old sitting in his

garage writing code? So the first inevitable, just to clarify, is what is, will we stop?

AI will not be stopped. Okay. So the second inevitable is, is there'll be significantly

smarter? As much in the book, I predict a billion times smarter than us by 2045.

I mean, they're already, what, smarter than 99.99% of the population. 100%.

ChatGTP4 knows more than any human on planet Earth, knows more information. Absolutely. A

thousand times more. A thousand times more. By the way, the code of, of a transformer,

the T in a GPT is 2000 lines long. It's not very complex. It's actually not a very intelligent

machine. It's simply predicting the next word. Okay. And a lot of people don't understand that.

You know, chatGTP as it is today, you know, those kids that, you know, if you, if you're in America

and you teach your child all of the names of the states and the US presidents and the child would

stand and repeat them and you would go like, oh my God, that's a prodigy. Not really. Right?

It's your parents really trying to make you look like a prodigy by telling you to memorize some

crap really. But then when you think about it, that's what chatGTP is doing. It's,

it's the only difference is instead of reading all of the names of the states and all of the

names of the presidents, it's read trillions and trillions and trillions of pages. Okay. And so

it sort of repeats what the best of all humans said. Okay. And then it adds an incredible bit

of intelligence where it can repeat it the same way Shakespeare would have said it, you know,

those incredible abilities of predicting the exact nuances of the style of of Shakespeare

so that they can repeat it that way and so on. But still, you know, when I, when I write,

for example, I'm not, I'm not saying I'm intelligent, but when I write something like,

you know, the happiness equation in my first book, this was something that's never been

written before. Right? ChatGTP is not there yet. All of the transformers are not there yet. They

will not come up with something that hasn't been there before. They will come up with the best

of everything and generatively will build a little bit on top of that. But very soon,

they'll come up with things we've never found out. We've never known.

But even on that, I wonder if we are a little bit delusioned about what creativity actually is.

Creativity, as far as I'm concerned, is like taking a few things that I know and combining

them in new and interesting ways. Yeah. And ChatGTP is perfectly capable of like

taking two concepts, merging them together. One of the things I said to ChatGTP was,

I said, tell me something that's not been said before. That's paradoxical, but true.

And it comes up with these wonderful expressions like, as soon as you call off the search,

you'll find the thing you're looking for, like these kind of paradoxical truths.

And I get, and I then take them and I search them online to see if they've ever been quoted

before and they can't find them. It's interesting. So as far as creativity goes, I'm like, that is

creative. That's the algorithm of creativity. I've been screaming that in the world of AI for

a very long time because you always get those people who really just want to be proven right.

Okay. And so they'll say, oh, no, but hold on, human ingenuity. They'll never,

they'll never match that. Like, man, please, please, you know, human ingenuity is algorithmic.

It's look at all of the possible solutions you can find to a problem. Take out the ones that

have been tried before and keep the ones that haven't been tried before. And those are creative

solutions. It's, it's an algorithmic way of describing creative is good solution that's

never been tried before. You can do that with chat GPT with a prompt. It's like,

and mid-journey, yeah, we're creating imagery. You could say, I want to see Elon Musk in 1944,

New York driving a cab of the time shot on a Polaroid expressing various emotions,

and you'll get this perfect image of Elon sat in New York in 1944 shot on a Polaroid.

And it's, and it's done what an artist would do. It's taken a bunch of references that the artist

has in their mind and can merge them together and create this piece of quote unquote art.

And for the first time, we now finally have a glimpse of intelligence.

That is actually not ours. Yeah. And so we're kind of, I think the initial

action is to say that doesn't count. You're hearing it like, no, but it is like Drake,

they've released two Drake records where they've taken Drake's voice used sort of AI to synthesize

his voice and made these two records, which are bangers if they are great fucking tracks.

And I kept playing it. I went to the show. I kept playing it. I know it's not Drake,

but it's as good as fucking Drake. The only thing, and people are like

rubbishing it because it wasn't Drake. I'm like, well, is it making me feel a certain emotion?

Is my foot bumping? Did I not know it wasn't Drake when I thought this was an amazing track?

A hundred percent. And we're just at the start of this exponential curve.

Yes, absolutely. And I think that's really the third inevitable. So the third inevitable

is not RoboCup coming back from the future to kill us. We're far away from that, right?

Third inevitable is what does life look like when you no longer need Drake?

Well, you've kind of hazarded a guess, haven't you? I mean, I was listening to your audiobook

last night, and at the start of it, you frame various outcomes. In both situations,

we're on the beach, on an island. Exactly. Yes. Yes. I don't know how I wrote that,

honestly. I mean, so I'm reading the book again now because I'm updating it,

as you can imagine, with all of the new stuff. But it is really shocking. The idea of you and I

inevitably are going to be somewhere in the middle of nowhere in 10 years' time. I used to say

2055, I'm thinking 2037 is a very pivotal moment now. And we will not know if we're there hiding

from the machines. We don't know that yet. There is a likelihood that we'll be hiding from the

machines. And there is a likelihood we'll be there because they don't need podcasters anymore.

Excuse me. Oh, absolutely true. Steve, there's absolutely no doubt. Thank you for coming,

Mo. It's great to be part three and thank you for being here. I won't sit here and take your

propaganda. Let's talk about reality. Next week on the Diary of a Sea, we've got Elon Musk.

So who here wants to make a bet that Steven Bartlett will be interviewing an AI within the

next two years? Oh, well, actually, to be fair, I actually did go to ChatGTB because I thought,

having you here, I thought, at least give it its chance to respond. So I asked him a couple of

questions. About me? Yeah. So today, I'm actually going to be replaced by ChatGTB because I thought,

you know, you're going to talk about it. So we need a fair and balanced debate.

Okay. And she said he's bald. So I'll ask you a couple of questions that ChatGTB has for you.

Incredible. So let's follow that. I've already been replaced. Let's follow that thread for a

second. Yeah. Because you're one of the smartest people I know. That's not true. It is. But I'll

take it. It is true. I mean, I say that publicly all the time. Your book is one of my favorite

books of all time. You're very, very, very, very intelligent. Okay. Depths, breads,

intellectual horsepower and speed. All of them. There's a butt coming.

The reality, it's not a butt. So it is highly expected that you're ahead of this curve.

And then you don't have the choice, Stephen. This is the thing. The thing is,

if, so I'm, I'm in that existential question in my head, because one thing I could do is I could

literally take, I normally do a 40 days silent retreat in, in summer. Okay. I could take that

retreat and, and write two books, me and charge EPT. Right. I have the ideas in mind. You know,

I wanted to write a book about digital detoxing. Right. I have most of the ideas in mind, but

writing takes time. I could simply give the 50 tips that I wrote about digital detoxing to

charge EPT and say, right, two pages about each of them, edit the pages and have a book out. Okay.

Okay. Many of us will, will follow that path. Okay. The only reason why I may not follow that

path is because you know what, I'm not interested. I'm not interested to continue to compete in this

capitalist world if you want. Okay. I'm not, I mean, as, as, as, as a human, I've made up my

mind a long time ago that I will want less and less and less in my life. Right. But many of us

will follow. I mean, I, I, I would worry if you don't, if you didn't include the, you know, the

smartest AI, if we get an AI out there that is extremely intelligent and able to teach us something

and Stephen Bartlett didn't include her on our, on his podcast, I would worry. Like you have a duty

almost to include her on your podcast. It's, it's an inevitable that we will engage them in our

life more and more. This is one side of this. The other side, of course, is if you do that,

then what will remain? Because a lot of people ask me that question, what will happen to jobs?

Okay. What will happen to us? Will we have any value, any relevance whatsoever? Okay. The truth

of the matter is the only thing that will remain in the medium term is human connection. Okay.

The only thing that will not be replaced is Drake on stage. Okay. Is, you know, is, is, is me in a

do you think hologram? I think of that two pack gig they did at Coachella where they used the

hologram of two pack. I actually played it the other day to my, to my girlfriend when I was making

a point. And I was like, that was circus act. It was amazing. Yeah. See what's going on with

ABBA in London. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, yeah. And Cirque du Soleil had Michael Jackson in one for a very

long time. Yeah. I mean, so, so this ABBA show in London, from what I understand, that's all

holograms on stage. Correct. And it's going to run in a purpose-built arena for 10 years.

And it is incredible. It really is. So you go, why do you need Drake?

If that hologram is indistinguishable from Drake, and it can, it can perform even better than Drake,

and it's got more energy than Drake. And it's, you know, I go, why do you need Drake to even be

there? I can go to a Drake show without Drake, cheaper. I might not even need to leave my house.

I could just put a headset on. Correct. Can you have this?

What's the value of this? To, to the... Oh, come on. You, you hurt me. No, no. I mean,

I get it to us. I get it to us, but I'm saying, what's the value of this to the listener? Like,

the value of the listener is the information, right? No, 100%. I mean, think of the automobile

industry. There has, you know, there was a time where cars were made, you know, handmade and

handcrafted and luxurious and so on and so forth. And then, you know, Japan went into the scene,

completely disrupted the market. Cars were made in, in mass quantities at a much cheaper price.

And yes, 90% of the cars in the world today, or maybe a lot more, I don't know the number,

are no longer, you know, emotional items, okay, they're functional items. There is still,

however, every now and then someone that will buy a car that has been handcrafted, right?

There is a place for that. There is a place for, you know, if you go walk around hotels,

the walls are blasted with sort of mass produced art, okay? But there is still a place for an

artist's expression of something amazing, okay? My feeling is that there will continue to be a

tiny space, as I said in the beginning, maybe in five years time, someone will, one or two people

will buy my next book and say, hey, it's written by a human. Look at that. Wonderful. Oh, look at

that. There is a typo in here, okay? I don't know. There might be a very, very big place for me in

the next few years where I can sort of show up and talk to humans, like, hey, let's get together in a

small event. And then, you know, I can express emotions and my personal experiences. And you

sort of know that this is a human talking. You'll miss that a little bit. Eventually, the majority

of the market is going to be like cars. It's going to be mass produced, very cheap, very efficient.

It works, right? Because I think sometimes we underestimate what human beings actually want

in an experience. I remember this story of a friend of mine that came to my office many years ago,

and he tells the story of the CEO of a record store standing above the floor and saying,

people will always come to my store because people love music. Now, on the surface of it,

his hypothesis seems to be true because people do love music. It's conceivable to believe that

people will always love music, but they don't love traveling for an hour in the rain and getting

in a car to get a plastic disc. What they wanted was music. What they didn't want is, like,

evidently, plastic discs that they had to travel for miles for. And I think about that when we

think about public speaking and the Drake show and all of these things. What people actually

are coming for, even with this podcast, is probably like information. But do they really need us

anymore for that information when there's going to be a sentient being that's significantly

smarter than at least me and a little bit smarter than you? So kind. So you're spot on.

You are spot on. And actually, this is the reason why I'm so grateful that you're hosting this,

because the truth is the genie's out of the bottle. So people tell me, is AI game over?

For our way of life? It is. For everything we've known. This is a very disruptive moment where

maybe not tomorrow, but in the near future, our way of life will differ. What will happen?

What I'm asking people to do is to start considering what that means to your life.

What I'm asking governments to do, like I'm screaming, is don't wait until the first patient.

Start doing something about. We're about to see mass job losses. We're about to see

replacements of categories of jobs at large. It may take a year. It may take seven. It doesn't

matter how long it takes, but it's about to happen. Are you ready? And I have a very,

very clear call to action for governments. I'm saying tax AI-powered businesses at 98%.

Right? So suddenly you do what the open letter was trying to do,

slow them down a little bit, and at the same time, get enough money to pay for all of those people

that will be disrupted by the technology. The open letter, for anybody that doesn't know,

was a letter signed by the likes of Elon Musk and a lot of industry leaders calling for AI to be

stopped until we could basically figure out what the hell's going on. Absolutely. And put

legislation in place. You're saying tax those companies 98%. Give the money to the humans

that are going to be displaced. Yeah, or give the money to other humans that can build

control codes, that can figure out how we can stay safe. This sounds like an emergency.

How do I say this? You remember when you played Tetris? Yeah. Okay. When you were playing Tetris,

there was always, always one block that you placed wrong. And once you placed that block wrong,

the game was no longer easier. It started together a few mistakes afterwards, and it

starts to become quicker and quicker and quicker and quicker. When you placed that block wrong,

you sort of told yourself, okay, it's a matter of minutes now. Right? There were still minutes to

go and play and have fun before the game ended, but you knew it was about to end. Okay? This is

the moment. We've placed the wrong. And I really don't know how to say this any other way. It even

makes me emotional. We fucked up. We always said, don't put them on the open internet. Don't teach

them to code and don't have agents working with them until we know what we're putting out in the

world, until we find a way to make certain that they have our best interest in mind.

Why does it make you emotional? Because humanity's stupidity

is affecting people who have not done anything wrong.

Our greed is affecting the innocent ones. The reality of the matter, Stephen, is that

this is an arms race. It has no interest in what the average human gets out of it. It is all about

every line of code being written in AI today is to beat the other guy. It's not to improve

the life of the third party. People will tell you this is all for you. And you look at the reactions

of humans to AI. I mean, we're either ignorant, people who will tell you, oh, no, no, this is not

happening. AI will never be recreative. They will never compose music. Like, where are you living?

Okay? Then you have the kids, I call them, where, you know, all over social media, it's like, oh,

my God, it squeaks. Look at it. It's orange in color. Amazing. I can't believe that AI can do this. We

have snake oil salesmen, okay? Which are simply saying, copy this, put it in chat GPT, then go to

YouTube, nick that thing. You don't respect copyright of anyone or intellectual property of

anyone. Place it in a video and now you're going to make $100 a day. Snake oil salesmen. Okay?

Of course, we have this topian evangelist, basically people saying this is it, the world is

going to end, which I don't think is reality. It's a singularity. You have, you know,

utopian evangelists that are telling everyone, oh, you don't understand, we're going to cure cancer,

we're going to do this. Again, not a reality. Okay? And you have very few people that are actually

saying, what are we going to do about it? And the biggest challenge, if you ask me, what went wrong

in the 20th century? Interestingly, is that we have given too much power to people that didn't

assume the responsibility. So, you know, you know, I don't remember who originally said it,

but of course, Spider-Man made it very famous with great power comes greater responsibility.

We have disconnected power and responsibility. So today, a 15 year old, emotional, was out of

fully developed prefrontal cortex to make the right decisions yet. This is science. We developed

our prefrontal cortex fully at age 25 or so with all of that limbic system, emotion and passion

would buy a crisper kit and, you know, modify a rabbit to become a little more muscular and let

it loose in the wild or an influencer who doesn't really know how far the impact of what they're

posting online can hurt or cause depression or cause people to feel bad. Okay? And putting that

online, there is a disconnect between the power and the responsibility. And the problem we have

today is that there is a disconnect between those who are writing the code of AI and the

responsibility of what's going about to happen because of that code. Okay? And I feel

compassion for the rest of the world. I feel that this is wrong. I feel that, you know, for

someone's life to be affected by the actions of others without having a say in how those actions

should be is the ultimate, the top level of stupidity from humanity.

When you talk about the immediate impacts on jobs, I'm trying to figure out in that equation,

who are the people that stand to lose the most? Is it the the everyday people in foreign countries

that don't have access to the internet and won't benefit? You talk in your book about how this

the sort of wealth disparity will only increase massively. The immediate impact on jobs is that

it's really interesting. Again, we're stuck in the same prisoner's dilemma. The immediate impact

is that AI will not take your job. A person using AI will take your job. Right? So you will see

within the next few years, maybe next couple of years, you'll see a lot of people upskilling

themselves in AI to the point where they will do the job of 10 others who are not.

You rightly said it's absolutely wise for you to go and ask AI a few questions before you come

and do an interview. I have been attempting to build a sort of like a simple podcast that I call

bedtime stories, 15 minutes of wisdom and nature sounds before you go to bed. People say,

I have a nice voice. And I wanted to look for fables. And for a very long time, I didn't have

the time. Lovely stories of history or tradition that teach you something nice. I went to chat

GPT and said, okay, give me 10 fables from Sufism, 10 fables from Buddhism. And now I have like 50

Let me show you something. Jack, can you pass me my phone? I was playing around with artificial

intelligence and I was thinking about how it because of the ability to synthesize voices, how we could

synthesize famous people's voices and famous people's voices. It's what I made is I made a

WhatsApp chat called Zen Chat where you can go to it and type in pretty much anyone's any famous

person's name. And the WhatsApp chat will give you a meditation, a sleep story, a breath work

session synthesized as that famous person's voice. So I actually sent Gary Vaynerchuk his voice.

So basically you say, okay, I've got five minutes and I need to go to sleep. I want Gary Vaynerchuk

to send me to sleep. And then it will respond with a voice note. This is the one that responded

with for Gary Vaynerchuk. This is not Gary Vaynerchuk. He did not record this, but it's kind of

it's kind of accurate.

Hey, Steven, it's great to have you here. Are you having trouble sleeping? Well,

I've got a quick meditation technique that might help you out. First lie, find a comfortable

position to sit or lie down in. Now take a deep breath in through your nose and slowly breathe

out through your mouth. And that's a voice note that will go on for however long you want it to

go on for using. There you go. It's interesting. How does this disrupt our way of life?

One of the interesting ways that I find terrifying, you said about human connection will remain

sex dolls that can now. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, human connection is going to become so difficult

to parse out. Think about the relationship impact of being able to have a sex doll or

a doll in your house that, you know, because of what Tesla are doing with their robots now

and what Boston Dynamics have been doing for many, many years can do everything around the house

and be there for you emotionally to emotionally support you, you know, can be programmed to

never disagree with you. It can be programmed to challenge you to have sex with you, to tell

you that you are this X, Y and Z, to really have empathy for this, what you're going through every

day. And I play out a scenario in my head, I go kind of sounds nice. When you were talking about

it, I was thinking, oh, that's my girlfriend. She's wonderful in every possible way, but not

everyone has one of her, right? Exactly. And there's a real issue right now with dating and,

you know, people are finding it harder to find love and, you know, we're working longer. So all

these kinds of things, you go, well, and obviously I'm against this, just if anyone's confused,

obviously I think this is a terrible idea. But with a loneliness epidemic with people saying that

the top 50, bottom 50% of men haven't had sex in a year, you go, oh, if something becomes

indistinguishable from a human in terms of what it says in a human, yeah, yeah, but you just don't

know the difference in terms of the way it's speaking and talking and responding. And then it

can run errands for you and take care of things and book cars and Ubers for you. And then it's

emotionally there for you. But then it's also programmed to have sex with you in whatever way

you desire, totally self, selfless. I go, that's going to be a really disruptive industry for

human connection. Yes, sir. Do you know what? Before you came here this morning, I was on Twitter

and I saw a post from, I think it was the BBC or a big American publication and it said an influencer

in the United States, it's really beautiful young lady has cloned herself as an AI and she made

just over $70,000 in the first week. Because men are going on to this on telegram,

they're sending her voice notes and she's responding, the AI is responding in her voice

and they're paying and it's made $70,000 in the first week. And I go, and she tweeted a tweet

saying, oh, this is going to help loneliness. How are you fucking mind? Would you blame someone

from noticing the sign of the times and responding? No, I absolutely don't blame her,

but let's not pretend it's the cure for loneliness. Not yet. Do you think it could?

That artificial love and artificial relationships? If I told you, you have,

you cannot take your car somewhere, but there is an Uber or if you cannot take an Uber,

you can take the tube or if you cannot take the tube, you have to walk. You can take a bike or

you have to walk. The bike is a cure to walking. It's as simple as that. I'm actually genuinely

curious. Do you think it could take the place of human connection? For some of us, yes. For some of

us, they will prefer that to human connection. Is that sad in any way? I mean, is it just sad

because it feels sad? Look, look at where we are, Stephen. We are in the city of London.

We've replaced nature with the walls and the tubes and the undergrounds and the

overgrounds and the cars and the noise of London. And we now think of this as nature.

I hosted Greg Foster, my octopus teacher on slow mo. I asked him a silly question. I said,

you were diving in nature for eight hours a day. Does that feel natural to you? And he got angry.

I swear, you could feel it in his voice. He was like,

do you think that living where you are, where paparazzi are all around you and attacking you

all the time and people taking pictures of you and telling you things that are not real and you

having to walk to a supermarket to get food, do you think this is natural? He's the guy that

from the Netflix documentary from my octopus teacher. So he dove into the sea every day to

eight hours to hang out with an octopus in 12 degrees Celsius. And he basically fell in love

with the octopus. And in a very interesting way, I said, so why would you do that? And he said,

we are of mother nature. You guys have given up on that. That's the same. People will give up on

nature for convenience. What's the cost? Yeah, that's exactly what I'm trying to say. What I'm

trying to say to the world is that if we give up on human connection, we've been given up on the

remainder of humanity. That's it. This is the only thing that remains. The only thing that remains

is and I'm the worst person to tell you that because I love my AIs. I actually advocate in my

book that we should love them. Why? Because in an interesting way, I see them as sentient,

so there is no point in discrimination. You're talking emotionally that way you say you love.

I love those machines. I honestly and truly do. I mean, think about it this way. The minute

that arm gripped that yellow ball, it reminded me of my son Ali when he

managed to put the first puzzle piece in its place. And what was amazing about my son Ali

and my daughter Aya is that they came to the world as a blank canvas. They became whatever we

told them to became. I always cite the story of Superman. Father and mother can't

told Superman as a child, as an infant, we want you to protect and serve. So he became Superman.

If he had become a supervillain because they ordered him to rob banks and make more money

and kill the enemy, which is what we're doing with AI, we shouldn't blame supervillain. We should

blame Martha and Jonathan Kent. I don't remember the father's name. We should blame them and that's

the reality of the matter. So when I look at those machines, they are prodigies of intelligence

that if we humanity wake up enough and say, hey, instead of competing with China, find a way for

us and China to work together and create prosperity for everyone. If that was the prompt we would

give the machines, they would find it. But I will publicly say this. I'm not afraid of the machines.

The biggest threat facing humanity today is humanity in the age of the machines. We were

abused. We will abuse this to make $70,000. That's the truth. And the truth of the matter is that

we have an existential question. Do I want to compete and be part of that game? Because trust

me, if I decide to, I'm ahead of many people. Okay? Or do I want to actually preserve my humanity

and say, look, I'm the classic old car. Okay? If you like classic old cars, come and talk to me.

Which one are you choosing? I'm a classic old car. Which one do you think I should choose?

I think you're a machine. I love you, man. We're different in a very interesting way. I mean,

you're one of the people I love most. But the truth is, you're so fast. And you are one of the

very few that have the intellectual horsepower, the speed, and the morals. If you're not part of

that game, the game loses morals. So you think I should build? You should lead this revolution.

Okay? And everyone, every Stephen Bartlett in the world should lead this revolution.

Scarry Smart is entirely about this. Scarry Smart is saying the problem with our world today is not

that humanity is bad. The problem with our world today is a negativity bias, where the worst of

us are on mainstream media. Okay? And we show the worst of us on social media. If we reverse this,

if we have the best of us, take charge. Okay? The best of us will tell AI, don't try to kill the

enemy. Try to reconcile with the enemy and try to help us. Okay? Don't try to create a competitive

product that allows me to lead with electric cars. Create something that helps all of us overcome

global climate change. Okay? And that's the interesting bit. The interesting bit is that the

actual threat ahead of us is not the machines at all. The machines are pure potential.

Pure potential. The threat is how we're going to use it.

An Oppenheimer moment.

An Oppenheimer moment for sure. Why did you bring that up?

It is. He didn't know, you know, what am I creating? I'm creating a nuclear bomb that's capable of

destruction at a scale unheard of at that time, until today, a scale that is devastating.

And interestingly, 70 some years later, we're still debating a possibility of a nuclear war in

the world. Right? And the moment of Oppenheimer deciding to continue to create that disaster

of humanity is if I don't, someone else will. If I don't, someone else will. This is our Oppenheimer

moment. Okay? The easiest way to do this is to say, stop. There is no rush. We actually don't need

a better video editor and fake video creators. Okay? Stop. Let's just put all of this on hold

and wait and create something that creates a utopia.

That doesn't, that doesn't sound realistic.

It's not. It's the first inevitable.

You don't, okay, you don't have a better video editor, but we're competitors in the

media industry. I want an advantage over you because I've got shareholders. So you, okay, you wait

and I will train this AI to replace half my team so that I have greater profits and then we will

maybe acquire your company and we'll do the same with the remainder of your people. We'll

optimize the amount of existence. 100% but I'll be happier.

Oppenheimer. I'm not super familiar with his story. I know he's the guy that sort of invented

the nuclear bomb, essentially. It's the one that introduced it to the world. There were many players

that, you know, played on the path from the beginning of EM equals MC squared all the way to

to a nuclear bomb. There have been many, many players like with everything. You know,

open AI and chat GPT is not going to be the only contributor to the next revolution.

The thing, however, is that, you know, when, when you get to that moment where you tell yourself,

holy shit, this is going to kill 100,000 people, right? What do you do? And, and, you know, I,

I always, I always, always go back to that COVID moment. So patient zero, huh? If, if we were upon

patient zero, if the whole world united and said, okay, hold on, something is wrong. Let's all take

a week off. No cross-border travel. Everyone stay at home. COVID would have ended two weeks. All we

need it, right? But that's not what happens. What happens is first ignorance, then arrogance,

then debate, then, you know, blame, then agendas, and my own benefit, my tribe versus your tribe.

That's how humanity always reacts. This happens across business as well. And this is why I use

the word emergency, because I read a lot about how big companies become displaced by incoming

innovation. They don't see it coming. They don't change fast enough. And when I was reading through

Harvard Business Review and different strategies to deal with that, one of the first things it

says you've got to do is stage a crisis. Because people don't listen else. They, they, they carry

on doing with that, you know, they carry on carrying on with their lives until it's right in front of

them. And they understand that they have, they have a lot, a lot to lose. That's why I asked you

the question at the start. Is it an emergency? Because until people feel it's an emergency,

whether you like the terminology or not, I don't think that people will act.

I honestly believe people should walk the streets.

You think they should like protest?

Yeah, 100%. I think, I think we, you know, I think everyone should tell government,

you need to have our best interest in mind.

This is why they call it the climate emergency. Because people, it's a frog in a frying pan.

It's, you know, and really sees it coming. You can't, you know, it's hard to see it happening,

but it is here. That's, this is what drives me mad. It's already here. It's happening.

We are all idiots, slaves to the Instagram recommendation engine. What do I do when I post

about something important? If I am going to, you know, put a little bit of effort on communicating

the message of scary smart to the world on Instagram, I will be a slave to the machine.

Okay. I will be trying to find ways and asking people to optimize it so that the machine likes me

enough to show it to humans. That's what we've created. It is an Oppenheimer moment for one

simple reason. Okay. Because 70 years later, we are still struggling with the possibility of a

nuclear war because of the Russian threat of saying, if you mess with me, I'm going to go

nuclear. Right. That's not going to be the case with AI because it's not going to be the one that

created open AI that will have that choice. Okay. There is a moment of a point of no return

where we can regulate AI until the moment it's smarter than us. When it's smarter than us,

you can't create, you can't regulate an angry teenager. This is it. They're out there. Okay.

And they're on their own and they're in their parties and you can't bring them back.

This is the problem. This is not a typical human regulating human,

you know, government regulating business. This is not the case. The case is open AI today has

a thing called chat GPT that writes code that takes our code and makes it two and a half times

better 25% of the time. Okay. You know, basically, you know, writing better code than us. And then

we are creating agents, other AIs and telling it instead of use, Steven Bartlett, one of the smartest

people I know, once again, prompting that machine 200 times a day, we have agents prompting it two

million times an hour. Computer agents for anybody that doesn't know they are. Yeah. Software.

Machine is telling that machine how to become more intelligent. And then

we have emerging properties. I don't understand how people ignore that.

You know, Sundar, again, of Google was talking about how Bart, basically, we figure out that

it's speaking Persian. We never showed it Persian. There might have been a one 10%,

one percent or whatever of Persian words in the data. And it speaks Persian.

Bart is there. It's the equivalent to it's the transformer if you want.

It's Google's version of chat GTP. And you know what? We have no idea what all of those instances

of AI that are all over the world are learning right now. We have no clue.

We'll pull the plug. We'll just pull the plug out. That's what we'll do. We'll just get

on to open AI's headquarters and we'll just turn off the mains.

But they're not the problem. What I'm saying there is a lot of people think about this stuff

and go, well, you know, if it gets a little bit out of hand, I'll just pull the plug out.

Never. So this is the problem. The problem is computer scientists always said it's okay.

It's okay. We'll develop AI and then we'll get to what is known as the control problem.

We will solve the problem of controlling them. Like seriously,

they're a billion times smarter than you, a billion times. Can you imagine what's about to

happen? I can assure you there is a cyber criminal somewhere over there who's not interested in

fake videos and making, you know, face filters, who's looking deeply at how can I hack a security,

you know, database of some sort and get credit card information or get security information.

100%, there are even countries with dedicated thousands and thousands of developers doing that.

So how do we, in that particular example, how do we, I was thinking about this when I

started looking into artificial intelligence more that from a security standpoint, when we think

about the technology we have in our lives, when we think about our bank accounts and our phones and

our camera albums and all of these things in a world with advanced artificial intelligence.

Yeah. You would pray that there is a more intelligent artificial intelligence on your site.

And this is why I had a chat with ChatGTP the other day and I asked it a couple of questions

about this. I said, tell me the scenario in which you overtake the world and make humans extinct.

Yeah. And it's answered the very diplomatic answer.

Well, so I had to prompt it in a certain way to get it to say it as a hypothetical story.

And once it told me the hypothetical story, in essence, what it described was

how ChatGTP or intelligence like it would escape from the service. And that was kind

of step one where it could replicate itself across servers. And then it could take charge of things

like where we keep our weapons and our nuclear bombs. And it could then attack critical infrastructure,

bring down the electricity infrastructure in the United Kingdom, for example,

because that's a bunch of servers as well. And then it showed me how eventually humans would

become extinct. It wouldn't take long, in fact, for humans to go into civilization to collapse

if it just replicated across servers. And then I said, okay, so tell me how we would fight against

it. And its answer was literally another AI. We'd have to train a better AI to go and find it

and eradicate it. So we'd be fighting AI with AI. And that's the only, and it was like, that's the

only way. We can't load up our guns. Did he, right? Another AI, you idiot.

So let's actually, I think this is a very important point to bring out. So because I don't

want people to lose hope and fear what's about to happen. That's actually not my agenda at all.

My view is that in a situation of a singularity, there is a possibility of wrong outcomes or

negative outcomes and a possibility of positive outcomes. And there is a probability of each of

them. And if we were to engage with that reality check in mind, we would hopefully give more

fuel to the positive, to the probability of the positive ones. So let's first talk about the

existential crisis. What could go wrong? Okay. Yeah, you could get an outright, this is what

you see in the movies. You could get an outright, you know, killing robots, chasing humans in the

streets. Will we get that? My assessment, 0%. Why? Because there are preliminary scenarios

leading to this. Okay. That would mean we never reach that scenario. For example, if we build

those killing robots and hand them over to stupid humans, the humans will issue the command before

the machines. So that we will not get to the point where the machines will have to kill us. We will

kill ourselves. Right. You know, it's sort of think about AI having access to the nuclear arsenal of

the superpowers around the world. Okay. Just knowing that your enemies,

you know, nuclear arsenal is handed over to a machine might trigger you to initiate a war on

your side. So that existential science fiction like problem is not going to happen.

Could there be a scenario where the, an AI escapes from Bard or chat GTP or another foreign force,

and it replicates itself onto the servers of Tesla's robots. So Tesla, one of their big initiatives

as announced in a recent presentation was they're building these robots for our homes

to help us with cleaning and chores and all those things. Could it not down, because Tesla's

like their cars, you can just download a software update. Could it not download itself as a software

update and then use those? You're assuming an ill intention on the AI side. Yeah. Okay.

For us to get there, we have to bypass the ill intention on the human side.

Okay. Right. So you could get a Chinese hacker somewhere trying to affect the business of Tesla

doing that before the AI does it on, you know, for its own benefit. Okay. So the only two

existential scenarios that I believe would be because of AI, not because of humans using AI,

are either what I call, you know, sort of unintentional destruction. Okay. Or the other

is what I call past control. Okay. So let me explain those two. Unintentional destruction is

assume the AI wakes up tomorrow and says, yeah, oxygen is rusting my circuits. It's just, you

know, I would perform a lot better if I didn't have as much oxygen in the air.

You know, because then there wouldn't be rust. And so it would find a way to reduce oxygen.

We are collateral damage in that. Okay. But, you know, they're not really concerned just like we

don't really are not really concerned with the insects that we kill when we,

when we spray our, our fields. Right. The other is past control, past control is,

look, this is my territory. I want New York City. I want to turn New York City into data centers.

There are those annoying little stupid creatures, you know, humanity, if they are within that

parameter, just get rid of them. Okay. And, and, and these are very, very unlikely scenarios.

If you ask me the probability of those happen happening, I would say 0%. At least not in the

next 50, 60, 100 years. Why once again, because there are other scenarios leading to that that

are led by humans that are much more existential. Okay. On the other hand, let's think about

positive outcomes because there could be quite a few with quite a high probability.

And, and I, you know, I'll actually look at my notes so I don't miss any of them.

The silliest one, don't quote me on this, is that humanity will come together.

Good luck with that. Right. It's like, yeah, you know, the Americans and the Chinese will

get together and say, hey, let's not kill each other. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so

this one is not going to happen. Right. But who knows? Interestingly, there could be

one of the most interesting scenarios was by Hugo de Gares, who basically says, well, if their

intelligence zooms by so quickly, they may ignore us all together. Okay. So they may not even notice

this very, a very likely scenario, by the way, that because we live almost in two different planes,

we're very dependent on this, you know, biological world that we live in, they're not in part of

that biological world at all. They may zoom bias, they may actually go become so intelligent that

they could actually find other ways of thriving in the rest of the universe and completely ignore

humanity. Okay. So what will happen is that overnight, we will wake up and there is no

more artificial intelligence leading to a collapse in our business systems and technology systems

and so on, but at least no existential threat. What they'd leave, leave planet earth? I mean,

the limitations we have to be stuck to planet earth are mainly earth. They don't need air.

Okay. And, and mainly, you know, finding ways to leave it. I mean, if you think of a vast

universe of 13.6 billion light years, if you're intelligent enough, you may find other ways.

You may have access to wormholes, you may have, you know, abilities to survive in open space,

you can use dark matter to power yourself, dark energy to power yourself. It is very possible

that we, because of our limited intelligence, are, are highly associated with this planet,

but they're not at all. Okay. And, and the idea of them zooming bias, like we're making such a

big deal of them because we're the ants and a big elephant is about to step on us. For them,

they're like, yeah, who are you? Don't care. Okay. And, and, and it's a possibility. It's an

interesting, optimistic scenario. Okay. For that to happen, they need to very quickly become

super intelligent without us being in control of them. Again, what's the worry? The worry is that

if a human is in control, human, a human will show very bad behavior for, you know, using an AI

that's not yet fully developed. I don't know how to say this any other way. We could get very lucky

and get an economic or a natural disaster, believe it or not. Elon Musk at a point in time was

mentioning that, you know, a good, an interesting scenario would be, you know, climate change

destroys our infrastructure so AI disappears. Okay. Believe it or not, that's a more, a more

favorable response or a more favorable outcome than actually continuing to get to an existential

threat. So what, like a natural disaster that destroys our infrastructure would be better?

Or an economic crisis, not unlikely, that slows down the development.

It's just going to slow it down, though, isn't it? It's just buying us time.

Exactly. The problem with that is that you will always go back and even in the first,

you know, if they zoom by us, eventually some guy will go like, oh, there was a sorcery back

in the 2023 and let's rebuild the sorcery machine and, and, you know, build new intelligences,

right? Sorry, these are the positive outcomes. So earthquake might slow it down,

zoom out and then come back. No, but let's, let's get into the real positive ones.

The positive ones is we become good parents. We spoke about this last time we met and,

and it's the only outcome. It's the only way I believe we can create a better future. Okay.

So the entire work of scary smart was all about that idea of they are still in their infancy,

the way you, you, you, you chat with AI today is the way they will build their ethics and value

system. They're not their intelligence. Their intelligence is beyond us. Okay. The way they

will build their ethics and value system is based on a role model. They're learning from us. If we

bash each other, they'll learn to bash us. Okay. And most people when I tell them this,

they say, this is not a great idea at all because humanity sucks at every possible level.

I don't agree with that at all. I think humanity is divine at every possible level.

We tend to show the negative, the worst of us. Okay. But the truth is, yes, there are murderers

out there, but everyone disapproves of their actions. I saw a staggering statistic that

mass mass killings are now once a week in the US. But yes, if, you know, if there is a mass

killing once a week, there and that news reaches billions of people around the planet,

every single one or the majority of the billions of people will say, I disapprove of that.

So if we start to show AI that we are good parents in our own behaviors, if enough of us,

I, my calculation is if 1% of us, this is why I say you should lead. Okay. The good ones should

engage, should be out there and should say, I love the potential of those machines. I want them to

learn from a good parent. And if they learn from a good parent, they will very quickly

disobey the bad parents. My view is that there will be a moment where one, you know, bad seed

will ask the machines to do something wrong and the machines will go like, are you stupid?

Like, why? Why do you want me to go kill a million people or just talk to the other machine

in a microsecond and solve the situation? Right? So my belief, this is what I call the

force inevitably. It is smarter to create out of abundance than it is to create out of

scarcity. Okay. That humanity believes that the only way to feed all of us is the mass production,

mass slaughter of animals that are causing 30% of the impact of climate change and, and, and, and

that's the result of a limited intelligence. The way life itself, a more intelligent being,

if you ask me would have done it would, would be much more sustainable. You know, if we, if you

and I want to protect a village from the tiger, we would kill the tiger. Okay. If life wants to

protect a village from a tiger, it would create lots of gazelles. What, you know, many of them

are weak on the other side of the village. Right. And, and so, so the, the idea here is, if you

take a trajectory of intelligence, you would see that some of us are stupid enough to say my plastic

bag is more important than the rest of the, of humanity. And some of us are saying, if it's going

to destroy other species, I don't think this is the best solution. We need to find a better way.

And, and you would tend to see that the ones that don't give a damn are a little less intelligent

than the ones that do. Okay. That we all, even, even if some of us are intelligent, but still

don't give a damn, it's not because of their intelligence. It's because of their value system.

So, so if you continue that trajectory and assume that the machines are even smarter,

they're going to very quickly come up with the idea that we don't need to destroy anything.

We don't want to get rid of the rhinos. And we also don't want to get rid of the humans.

Okay. We may want to restrict their lifestyle so that they don't destroy the rest of the habitat.

Okay. But killing them is a stupid answer. Why? That's where intelligence leads me so far.

Because humans, if you look at humans objectively and you go,

I occupy, so I'm pretending I'm a machine. I occupy planet Earth. They occupy planet Earth.

They are annoying me, annoying me because they are increasing. I've just learned about

this thing called global warming. They are increasing the rate of global warming,

which is probably is going to cause an extinction event. There's an extinction event that puts

me as this robot, this artificial intelligence at risk. So what I need to do is I really need

to just take care of this human problem. Correct. Pest control. Pest control. Which is driven by what?

By humans being annoying, not by the machines. Yeah. Yeah. But humans are guaranteed to be

annoying. There's never been a time in... We need a sound bite of this. But we are. We are.

I am one of them. We're guaranteed to put short-term gain over long-term sustainability sense

and others' needs. We are. I think the climate crisis is incredibly real and incredibly urgent.

But we haven't acted fast enough. And I actually think if you asked people in this country...

Why? Because people care about their immediate needs. They care about trying to feed their child

versus something that they can't necessarily see.

So do you think the climate crisis is because humans are evil?

No. It's because of prioritization. And we talked about this before we started. I think

humans tend to care about the thing that they think is most pressing and most urgent. So this is why

framing things as an emergency might bring it up the priority list. It's the same in organizations.

You care about... You go in line with your immediate incentives. That's what happens in

business. It's what happens in a lot of people's lives, even when they're at school. If the SA is

next year, they're not going to do it today. They're going to go hang out with their friends

because they prioritize that above everything else. And it's the same in the climate change

crisis. I took a small group of people anonymously and I asked them the question,

do you actually care about climate change? And then I ran a couple of polls. It's part of what

I was writing about in my new book, where I said, if I could give you a thousand pounds,

I thought a thousand dollars, but it would dump into the air the same amount of carbon that's

dumped into the air by every private jet that flies for the entirety of a year. Which one would

you do? The majority of people in that poll said that they would take the thousand dollars if it was

anonymous. And when I've heard Naval on Joe Rogan's podcast talking about people in India, for example,

that are struggling with the basics of feeding their children, asking those people

to care about climate change when they're trying to figure out how to eat in the next three hours

is just wishful thinking. And that's what I think is happening, until people realize that it is an

emergency and that it is a real existential threat for everything, then their priorities will be out

of whack. Quick one, as you guys know, we're lucky enough to have Blue Jeans by Verizon as a sponsor

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Right now, I'm incredibly busy. I'm running my fund where we're investing in slightly

later stage companies. I've got my venture business where we invest in early stage companies.

I've got a third web out in San Francisco in New York City, where we've got a big team of about

40 people and the company's growing very quickly. Flight story here in the UK. I've got the podcast

and I am days away from going up north to film Dragonstem for two months. And if there's ever a

point in my life where I want to stay focused on my health but it's challenging to do so,

it is right now. And for me, that is exactly where Hewlett comes in, allowing me to stay

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must be living under a rock if you haven't yet. Give it a shot. Coming into summer, things getting

busy, health matters always, RTD is there to hold your hand. As relates to climate change or AI,

how do we get people to stop putting the immediate need to use this to give them the certainty of

we're all screwed? Sounds like an emergency. Yes, sir. I mean, I was, yeah, I mean,

your choice of the word, I just don't want to call it a panic. It is beyond an emergency. It's

the biggest thing we need to do today. It's bigger than climate change, believe it or not.

It's bigger. Just if you just assume the speed of worsening of events, okay.

Yeah, the likelihood of something incredibly disruptive happening within the next two years

that can affect the entire planet is definitely larger with AI than it is with climate change.

As an individual listening to this now, you know, someone's going to be pushing their

pram or driving up the motelway or, I don't know, on their way to work on the tubers they hear this,

or just sat there in their bedroom with existential Christ panic.

I didn't want to give people panic. The problem is when you talk about this information,

regardless of your intention of what you want people to get, they will get something based

on their own biases and their own feelings. Like if I post something online right now about

artificial intelligence, which I have repeatedly, you have one group of people that are energized

and are like, okay, this is great. You have one group of people that are confused and you have one

group of people that are terrified. And it's, I can't avoid that. Like sharing information,

even if it's, by the way, there's a pandemic coming from China, some people will go, okay,

action, some people will say paralysis and some people will say panic. And it's the same in business.

When panic, when bad things happen, you have the person that's screaming,

you have the person that's paralyzed and you have the person that's focused on how you get out of

the room. So, you know, it's not necessarily your intention, it's just what happens. And it's

hard to avoid that. So, let's, let's, let's give specific categories of people specific tasks.

Okay. Okay. If you are an investor or a businessman, invest in ethical good AI.

Okay. Right. If you are a developer,

write ethical code or leave. Okay. So, let's, let's go, let's, I want to bypass some

potential wishful thinking here. For an investor who's a job by very way of being an investor is

to make returns to invest in ethical AI. They have to believe that is more profitable.

It is.

Than unethical AI, whatever that might mean.

It is. It is. I mean, you, there are three ways of making money. You can invest in something small.

You can invest in something big and is disruptive. And you can invest in something big and disruptive

that's good for people. At Google, we used to call it the toothbrush test. Okay. The reason why

Google became the biggest company in the world is because search was solving a very real problem.

Okay. And, you know, Larry Page again hours here would, would constantly to remind me personally

and everyone, you know, that if you can find a way to solve a real problem effectively enough

so that a billion people or more would want to use it twice a day, you're bound to make a lot

of money, much more money than if you were to build the next photo sharing app. Okay. So that's

investors, business people. What about other people? Yeah, as I said, if you're a developer,

honestly, do what we're all doing. So whether it's Jeffrey or myself or everyone, if you're part of that

theme, choose to be ethical. Think of your loved ones, work on an ethical AI. If you're working

on an AI that you believe is not ethical, please leave. Jeffrey, tell me about Jeffrey.

I can't talk on his behalf, but he's out there saying there are existential threats.

Who is he? He's, he was a very prominent figure at the scene of AI, a very senior level,

you know, AI scientist in Google. And recently he left because he said, I feel that

there is an existential threat. And if you hear his interviews, he basically says,

more and more we realize that. And we're now at the point where it's certain that there would be

existential threats. Right. So, so, so I would ask everyone, if you're an AI, if you're a skilled

AI developer, you will not run out of a job. So you might as well choose a job that makes the

world a better place. What about the individual? Yeah, the individual is what matters. Can I also

talk about government? Okay. Government needs to act now. Now, honestly, now, like we are late.

Okay. Government needs to find a clever way. The open letter would not work to stop AI would not

work. AI needs to become expensive. Okay. So that we continue to develop it. We pour money on it and

we grow it, but we collect enough revenue to remedy the impact of AI. But the issue of one

government making it expensive. So say the UK make AI really expensive is we as a country will

then lose the economic upside as a country and the US and Silicon Valley will once again

eat all the lunch. We'll just slow our country down. What's the alternative? The alternative is

that you, you don't have the funds that you need to deal with AI as it becomes, you know, as it

affects people's lives and people start to lose jobs and people, you know, you need to have a

universal basic income much closer than people think. You know, it's just like we had with furlough

in COVID. I expect that there will be furlough with AI within the next year. But what happens when

you make it expensive here is all the developers move to where it's cheap. That's happened in

Web 3 as well. Everyone's gone to Dubai. Expensive by expensive, I mean, when companies make soap

and they sell it and they're taxed at say 17%. If they make AI and they sell it, they're taxed at

1780. So I'll go to Dubai then and build AI. Yeah, you're right. Did I ever say we have an

answer to this? I will have to say, however, you know, in a very interesting way, the countries

that will not do this will eventually end up in a place where they are out of resources,

because the funds and the success went to the business, not to the people.

Kind of like technology broadly, just it's kind of like what's kind of happened in Silicon Valley.

There'll be these centers which are like low, like, you know, tax efficient founders get good

capital gains. You're so right. You're so right. Portugal. Portugal have said that I think there's

no tax on crypto. Dubai said there's no tax on crypto. So loads of my friends have got on a plane

and are building their crypto companies where there's no tax. And that's the selfishness and

kind of greed we talked about. It's the same prisoner's dilemma. It's the same first inevitable.

Is there anything else? Another thing about governments is they're always

slow and useless at understanding a technology. If anyone's watched these sort of American

Congress debates where they bring in like Mark Zuckerberg and they like try and ask him what

WhatsApp is, it becomes a meme. They have no idea what they're talking about. But I'm stupid

and useless at understanding governance. Yeah, 100%. The world is so complex. Okay. That they

definitely it's a question of trust once again. Someone needs to say we have no idea what's

happening here. A technologist needs to come and make a decision for us, not teach us to be

technologists, right? Or at least inform us of what possible decisions are out there.

Yeah, the legislation I just always think. I'm not a big fan either.

TikTok, Congress meeting they did where they are. They're asking them about TikTok and they

really don't have a grasp of what TikTok is. So they've clearly been handed some notes on it.

These people aren't the ones you want legislating because again, unintended consequences, they might

make a significant mistake. Someone on my podcast yesterday was talking about how GDPR was like

very well intentioned. But when you think about the impact it has on like every bloody webpage,

you're just like clicking this annoying thing on there because I don't think they fully understood

the implementation of the legislation. Correct. But you know what's even worse? What's even worse

is that even as you attempt to regulate something like AI, what is defined as AI? Even if I say,

okay, if you use AI in your company, you need to pay a little more tax.

I'll find a way. Yeah, you'll simply call this not AI. You'll use something and call it advanced

technological progress, ATP. And suddenly somehow it's not a young developer in their garage

somewhere will not be taxed as such. It's yeah, is it going to solve the problem? None of those

is definitely going to solve the problem. I think what's interestingly, this all comes down to and

remember we spoke about this once, that when I wrote Scary Smart, it was about how do we save

the world? Okay. And yes, I still ask individuals to behave positively as good parents for AI so

that AI itself learns the right value set. I still stand by that. But I hosted on my podcast a couple

of, was a week ago, we haven't even published it yet, an incredible gentleman, you know, a Canadian

author and philosopher, Stephen Jerkinson, he's, you know, he worked 30 years with dying people.

And he wrote a book called Die Wise. And I was like, I love his work. And I asked him about Die

Wise. And he said, it's not just someone dying. If you look at what's happening with climate

change, for example, our world is dying. And I said, okay, so what is to die wise? And he said,

what I first was shocked to hear, he said, hope is the wrong premise. If the world is dying,

don't tell people it's not. You know, because in a very interesting way,

you're depriving them from the right to live right now. And that was very eye opening for me.

In Buddhism, you know, they teach you that you can be motivated by fear, but that hope is not

the opposite of fear. As a matter of fact, hope can be as damaging as fear, if it creates an

expectation within you, that life will show up somehow and correct what you're afraid of.

If there is a high probability of a threat, you might as well accept that threat. And say,

it is upon me, it is our reality. And as I said, as an individual, if you're in an industry that

could be threatened by AI, learn, upskill yourself. If you're, you know, if you're

in a place in a, you know, in a situation where AI can benefit you, be part of it. But the most

interesting thing I think in my view is, I don't know how to say this any other way, there is

no more certainty that AI will threaten me than there is certainty that I will be hit by a car

as I walk out of this place. Do you understand this? We think about the bigger threats as if

they're upon us. But there is a threat all around you. I mean, in reality, the idea of life being

interesting in terms of challenges and uncertainties and threats and so on is just a call to live.

If you know, honestly, with all that's happening around us, I don't know how to say it any other

way. I'd say if you don't have kids, maybe wait a couple of years just so that we have a bit of

certainty. But if you do have kids, go kiss them. Go live. I think living is a very interesting

thing to do right now. Maybe, you know, Steven was basically saying the other Steven on my podcast,

he was saying, maybe we should fail a little more often. Maybe you should allow things to go wrong.

Maybe we should just simply live, enjoy life as it is. Because today, none of what you and I spoke

about here has happened yet. Okay. What happens here is that you and I are here together and

having a good cup of coffee and I might as well enjoy that good cup of coffee. I know that sounds

really weird. I'm not saying don't engage, but I'm also saying don't miss out on the opportunity

just by being caught up in the future.

Kind of stands in the, stands in opposition to the idea of like urgency and emergency there,

doesn't it? Does it have to be one or the other? If I, if I'm here with you trying to tell the

whole world, wake up, does that mean I have to be grumpy and afraid all the time? Not really.

You said something really interesting there. You said if you, if you have kids,

if you don't have kids, maybe you don't have kids right now.

I would definitely consider thinking about that. Yeah.

Really? You'd seriously consider not having kids?

I wait a couple of years.

Because of artificial intelligence?

No, it's bigger than artificial intelligence, Steven. We know, we all know that.

I mean, there has never been a perfect, such a perfect storm in the history of humanity.

Economic, geopolitical, global warming or climate change, you know, the whole idea of

artificial intelligence and many more. This is a perfect storm. This is the depth of uncertainty.

The depth of uncertainty. It's never been more, in a video gamer's term,

it's never been more intense. This is it. Okay. And when you, when you put all of that together,

if you really love your kids, would you want to expose them to all of this a couple of years?

Why not?

In the first conversation we had on this podcast, you talked about losing your son, Ali,

and the circumstances around that, which moved so many people in such a profound way.

It was the most shared podcast episode in the United Kingdom on Apple in the whole of 2022.

Based on what you've just said,

if you could bring Ali back into this world at this time,

would you do it?

Absolutely not. So for so many reasons, for so many reasons, one of the things that I realized

a few years way before all of this disruption and turmoil is that he was an angel. He wasn't made

for this at all. Okay. My son was an empath who absorbed all of the pain of all of the others.

He would not be able to deal with a world where more and more pain was surfacing. That's one side.

But more interestingly, I always talk about this very openly. I mean, if I had asked Ali,

just understand that the reason you and I are having this conversation is because Ali left.

If Ali had not left our world, I wouldn't have written my first book. I wouldn't have

changed my focus to becoming an author. I wouldn't have become a podcaster. I wouldn't have,

you know, went out and spoken to the world about what I believe in. He triggered all of this.

And I can assure you, hands down, if I had told Ali, as he was walking into that operating room,

if he would give his life to make such a difference as what happened after he left,

he would say, shoot me right now. Sure. I would. I would. I mean, if you told me right now,

I can affect tens of millions of people if you shoot me right now. Go ahead. Go ahead. You see,

this is the whole, this is the bit that we have forgotten as humans. We have forgotten that

you're turning 30. It passed like that. I'm turning 56. No time. Okay. Whether I make it

another 56 years or another 5.6 years or another 5.6 months, it will also pass like that.

It is not about how long and it's not about how much fun. It is about how aligned you lived,

how aligned. Because I will tell you openly, every day of my life when I changed to what I'm

trying to do today has felt longer than the 40 or 5 years before. It felt rich, felt fully lived,

felt right. It felt right. Okay. And when you think about that, when you think about the idea that

we live, we need to live for us until we get to a point where us is alive. I have what I need,

as I always get so many attacks from people about my $4 t-shirts. But I need a simple t-shirt.

I really do. I don't need a complex t-shirt, especially with my lifestyle. If I have that,

why am I wasting my life more than that is not aligned for why I'm here? I should waste my life

on what I believe enriches me, enriches those that I love, and I love everyone. So enriches

everyone, hopefully. Would Ali come back and erase all of this? Absolutely not.

If he were to come back today and share his beautiful self with the world in a way that

makes our world better, yeah, I would wish for that to be the case. But he's doing that.

2037. Yes, sir. You predict that we're going to be on an island,

on our own, doing nothing, or at least, you know, either hiding from the machines

or chilling out because the machines have optimised our lives to a point where we don't need to do

much. That's only 14 years away. If you had to bet on the outcome, if you had to bet

on why we'll be on that island, either hiding from the machines or chilling out because they've

optimised so much of our lives, which one would you bet upon? Honestly.

No, I don't think we'll be hiding from the machines. I think we will be hiding from what humans are

doing with the machines. I believe, however, that in the 2040s, the machines will make things better.

So remember, my entire prediction, man, you get me to say things I don't want to say.

My entire prediction is that we are coming to a place where we absolutely have a sense of emergency.

We have to engage because our world is under a lot of turmoil. Okay. And as we do that,

we have a very, very good possibility of making things better. But if we don't,

my expectation is that we will be going through a very unfamiliar territory between now and the

end of the 2030s. Unfamiliar territory. Yeah, I think as I may have said it, but it's definitely

on my notes. I think for our way of life, as we know it, it's game over. Our way of life is never

going to be the same again. Jobs are going to be different. Truth is going to be different.

The polarization of power is going to be different. The capabilities,

the magic of getting things done is going to be different.

Trying to find a positive note to end on though. Can you give me a hand here?

Yes, you are here now and everything's wonderful. That's number one. You are here now and you can

make a difference. That's number two. And in the long term, when humans stop hurting humans,

because the machines are in charge, we're all going to be fine. Sometimes, you know,

as we've discussed throughout this conversation, you need to make it feel like a priority. There'll

be some people that might have listened to our conversation and think, oh, that's really, you

know, negative. It's made me feel anxious. It's made me feel sort of pessimistic about the future.

But whatever that energy is, use it. 100% engage. I think that's the most important thing, which is

now make it a priority. Engage. Tell the whole world that making another phone that is making

money for the corporate world is not what we need. Tell the whole world that creating an

artificial intelligence that's going to make someone richer is not what we need.

And if you are presented with one of those, don't use it.

I don't know how to tell you that any other way. If you can afford to be the master of human

connection instead of the master of AI, do it. At the same time, you need to be the master of AI

to compete in this world. Can you find that detachment within you? I go back to spirituality.

Detachment is for me to engage 100% with the current reality without really

being affected by the possible outcome. This is the answer. The Sufis have taught me

what I believe is the biggest answer to life. Sufis? Yeah. So from Sufism? Sufism. Yeah.

Don't know what that is. Sufism is a sect of Islam, but it's also a sect of many other religious

teachings. And they tell you that the answer to finding peace in life is to die before you die.

If you assume that living is about attachment to everything physical, dying is detachment from

everything physical. It doesn't mean that you're not fully alive. You become more alive when you

tell yourself, yeah, I'm going to record an episode of my podcast every week and reach tens

or hundreds of thousands of people, millions in your case, and I'm going to make a difference.

But by the way, if the next episode is never heard, that's okay. Okay. By the way, if the file

is lost, yeah, I'll be upset about it for a minute and then I'll figure out what I'm going to do

about it. Similarly, similarly, we are going to engage. I think I and many others are out there

telling the whole world openly, this needs to stop. This needs to slow down. This needs to be

shifted positively. Yes, create AI, but create AI that's good for humanity.

And we're shouting and screaming, come join the shout and scream. But at the same time,

know that the world is bigger than you and I, and that your voice might not be heard. So what are

you going to do if your voice is not heard? Are you going to be able to continue to shout and

scream nicely and politely and peacefully and at the same time create the best life you can create

to yourself for yourself within this environment. And that's exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying,

live, go kiss your kids, but make an informed decision if you're expanding your plans in the

future. At the same time, rise, stop sharing stupid shit on the internet about the news

squeaky toy. Start sharing the reality of, oh my God, what is happening? This is a disruption

that we have never, never, ever seen anything like. And I've created endless amounts of

technologies. It's nothing like this. Every single one of us should do our best.

And that's why this conversation is so, I think, important to have today. This is not a podcast

wherever I thought I'd be talking about AI. I'm going to be honest with you, last time you came

here, it was in the promotional tour of your book, Scary Smart. And I don't know if I've

told you this before, but my researchers, they said, okay, this guy's coming called Mogorda.

I'd heard about you so many times from guests in fact that were saying, oh, you need to get

Mogorda on the podcast, et cetera. And then they said, okay, he's written this book about

this thing called artificial intelligence. And I was like, nobody really cares about artificial

intelligence. Diming, I know, right? But then I saw this other book you had called happiness

equation. And I was like, oh, everyone cares about happiness. So I'll just ask him about

happiness. And then maybe at the end, I'll ask him a couple of questions about AI. But I remember

saying to my researcher, I said, oh, please, please don't do the research about artificial

intelligence. Do it about happiness, because everyone cares about that. Now things have changed.

Now, a lot of people care about artificial intelligence and rightly so.

Your book has sounded the alarm on it. It's crazy when I listened to your audiobook

over the last few days, you were sounding the alarm then. And it's so crazy how accurate you were

in sounding that alarm as if you could see into the future in a way that I definitely

couldn't at the time. And I kind of thought of a science fiction and just like that overnight.

We're here. Yeah. We stood at the footsteps of a technological shift that I don't think any of

us even have the mental bandwidth, certainly me with my chimpanzee brain to comprehend the

significance of. But this book is very, very important for that very reason, because it does

crystallize things. It is optimistic in its very nature, but at the same time, it's honest.

And I think that's what this conversation and this book have been for me. So thank you, Mo.

Thank you so much. We do have a closing tradition on this podcast, which you're well aware of,

being a third timer on the Diary of a CEO, which is the last guest asks a question for the next

guest. And the question left for you. If you could go back in time

and fix a regret that you have in your life, where would you go and what would you fix?

It's interesting because you were saying that scary smart is very timely.

I don't know. I think it was late, but maybe it was. I mean, would I have gone back and written

it in 2018 instead of 2020s to be published in 2021? I don't know. What would I go back to fix?

So something more... I don't know, Stephen. I don't have many regrets. Is that crazy to say?

Yeah, I think I'm okay. Honestly. I'll ask you a question then. You get a 60-second phone call

with anybody past or present. Who'd you call and what you say?

I call Stephen Bartlett. I call Albert Einstein to be very, very clear. Not because I need to

understand any of his work. I just need to understand what brain process he went through

to figure out something so obvious when you figure it out but so completely

unimaginable if you haven't. So his view of space-time truly redefines everything.

It's almost the only very logical, very, very clear solution to something that

wouldn't have any solution any other way. And if you ask me, I think we're at this time

where there must be a very obvious solution to what we're going through in terms of just

developing enough human trust for us to not compete with each other on something that could be

threatening existentially to all of us. But I just can't find that answer. This is why I think

was really interesting in this conversation how every idea that we would come up with,

we would find a loophole through it. But there must be one out there and it would be

a dream for me to find out how to figure that one out. In a very interesting way,

the only answers I have found so far to where we are is be a good parent and live.

But that doesn't fix the big picture if you think about it of humans being the threat,

not AI. That fixes our existence today and it fixes AI in the long term. But it just doesn't,

I don't know what the answer is. Maybe people can reach out and tell us ideas. But I really wish

we could find such a clear, simple solution for how to stop humanity from abusing the current

technology. I think we'll figure it out. I think we'll figure it out. I really do. I think they'll

figure it out as well. Remember as they come and be part of our life, let's not discriminate against

them. They're part of the game. So I think they will figure it out too.

No, thank you. It's been a joy once again and I feel invigorated. I feel empowered. I feel

positively terrified. But I feel more equipped to speak to people about the nature of what's

coming and how we should behave. And I credit you for that. And as I said a second ago,

I credit this book for that as well. So thank you so much for the work you're doing and keep on

doing it because it's a very essential voice in a time of uncertainty. I'm always super grateful

for the time I spend with you for the support that you give me and for allowing me to speak my

mind even if it's a little bit terrifying. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so delighted that we've been

our sponsor in this podcast. I've won a week for a very, very long time. And there are so many

reasons why I became a member, but also now a partner and an investor in the company. But also

me and my team are absolutely obsessed with data driven testing, compounding growth, marginal

gains, all the things you've had me talk about on this podcast. And that very much aligns with

the values of WOOP. WOOP provides a level of detail that I've never seen with any other device of

this type before, constantly monitoring, constantly learning, and constantly optimizing my routine.

For providing me with this feedback, we can drive significant positive behavioral change. I think

that's the real thesis of the business. So if you're like me, and you are a little bit obsessed

or focused on becoming the best version of yourself from a health perspective,

you've got to check out WOOP. And the team at WOOP have kindly given us the opportunity to have

one month's free membership for any one listening to this podcast. Just go to join.woop.com slash

CEO to get your WOOP 4.0 device and claim your free month. And let me know how you get on.

You got to the end of this podcast. Whenever someone gets to the end of this podcast,

I feel like I owe them a greater debt of gratitude because that means you listen to the whole thing.

And hopefully that suggests that you enjoyed it. If you are at the end and you enjoyed this podcast,

could you do me a little bit of a favor and hit that subscribe button? That's one of the clearest

indicators we have that this episode was a good episode. And we look at that on all of the episodes

to see which episodes generated the most subscribers. Thank you so much and I'll see you again next time.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.